Wine—both enjoying it with friends and producing it—is a major off-course passion for the three-time major winner

By: Ernie Els

I’ve always thought wine to be one of life’s great small pleasures. It is
accessible to mostly everyone, it is something you can share, and it comes in so
many wonderful different varietals. It also happens to mix well with two other
great passions of mine: golf and food. It’s hard to beat enjoying a nice bottle
of wine and a meal with friends after a game of golf. It makes you feel good
about life, don’t you think?

It’s one of the reasons we have a restaurant in
all of our wineries in South Africa and the primary logic behind our new
restaurant, The Big Easy, located in Stellenbosch. People tend to be very well
travelled these days, and not only are they better informed about wine, they are
altogether more inquisitive about ideal wine-food combinations. These
restaurants at wineries give patrons the opportunity to enjoy wine responsibly
and to discover the joys of great food complemented by great wines. Ultimately
I’m hoping we can open The Big Easy restaurants all over the world.

It is
wonderful to be able to sample different wines during my worldwide travels, but
South African wines are still my favorite. It is the wine I was first exposed
to, and I’ll always have a great fondness for it—basic human emotion, I suppose.

It took me a while before I discovered wine, though. When I lived at home
with my parents, my dad never drank alcohol. And I grew up in Johannesburg,
which felt seemingly a million miles from South Africa’s wine region.

It
wasn’t until the early 1990s, when I got to know Jean Engelbrecht, that I first
discovered wine and started to properly appreciate it. My wife, Liezl, and I had
just met and we went to a barbeque at his winery. Jean and I struck up a great
friendship and went into business together almost 10 years ago, launching Ernie
Els Wines.

Being “just” a sportsman, I suppose it wasn’t surprising that
some people viewed this business venture with suspicion and even a degree of
cynicism. “Just another product endorsement,” they perhaps thought.

They
could not have been farther wide of the mark. We have just released our ninth
vintage and each has scored 91 points or higher by the bible of the industry,
Wine Spectator. In this business you are measured not only by the quality of the
product but also its consistency. On that basis, we are viewed as a serious wine
maker now. That’s very gratifying. And no one can be in any doubt now that we’re
in this for the long run.

It’s a fascinating business, with much more to it
than meets the eye. I like to be hands-on, whether it’s designing a golf course
or trying to blend the varietals to create the perfect bottle of red wine.
Each takes time and you need patience, in the sense that what you do today might
not come to fruition for many years.

Wine tasting is definitely an art, but
it is an art that can be learned. I’m on the tasting panel at Ernie Els Wines
and a couple of times a year we’ll sit down to taste the wine at various stages
in its development, long before it even makes its way into the bottle. My palate
has developed and matured; I am now better able to identify the nuances of a
wine and to differentiate between its many characteristics. That means I’m able
to give better feedback to the guys at the vineyard so they can produce a more
polished product.

The process is not unlike another interest of mine: motor
racing. As a novice driver you just drive the car. As you gain experience, you
start to understand more about how the car works. You get more technically
minded and are able to give better input and feedback to the mechanic, who in
turn makes the car better. The wine taster and the driver shoulder the same
responsibility of giving the best possible feedback.

But with wine, you have
to wait a bit longer to appreciate the fruits of your labor.